I can not remember when I started reading or why. If it is true that children ape their parents, then it is natural that I did. My father was to be always found with a book – whether at lunch, or in the moments he had snatched from the day for himself. All he wanted on Sunday afternoons was to be stretched out on the comfortable arm-chair with a book, with no one talking to him. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for little girls to leave their father alone on a Sunday afternoon? We got unceremoniously shooed off if we persisted in bothering him.

Our old ancestral home where I grew up was overflowing with books – books amassed by generations of Pendharkars that had lived there, starting from my Great Grandfather. There have been ardent readers in my family for generations and they all seemed to have believed in buying a lot of books. In that era, it was common to send your kids to the big town for higher education and more often than not, if there were relatives in the big town, that’s where they stayed. A multitude of my Grandfather’s and father’s cousins have called the place their home at some time or another and have enriched it by leaving behind books that they could not carry away. And because the contributors were so varied and so many, the collection contains books of an astounding variety. Continue reading →